Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Doug Bandow, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, discusses the recent Chinese naval conflict with the U.S., the increase in China’s regional stature and popular nationalism, the broad spectrum of U.S. interest groups that have grievances with China and why open relations are preferable to military confrontation.

Many of the U.S. interest groups feeding grievences through the press to turn the American public against China are the same folks who have made it their “cause celebre” to turn us against other countries not under the thumb of American foreign policy.

In a recent discussion with a Chinese National living on and off in the U.S., he spared no words when I asked about negative changes in Chinese public reception of visiting Americans there on business. Mr. Cho ( we’ll call him ) was quick to agree with my accusation about a building Chinese unfriendliness. His responded by expressing an opinion that China’s Chinese were fed up with being attacked unjustly and incessantly by the western media.

Our national signature has become one of minding everyone’s business overseas when, in fact, we can not keep our own house in order domestically or foreign policy wise. If Americans do not understand that the world’s economic and political crises are chiefly an American phenomenon, well the Chinese and others out there most certainly do.

This recent adventurism of ours off China’s shore is a reminder of Gulf of Tonkin days and Lyndon B’s using that incident to pour half a million men into Vietnam in 1965. If this recent event with Chinese “fishing boats” is anything it surely smells of “the fight started when they hit us back”. We have learned well from our own devious sources how to provoke and then scapegoat others.

We need, however, to low key the arrogance we seem to have acquired over the last half century. We can’t handle whast we hve dug up elsewhere and we insist to take bites at additional governments. If we resent China’s production and banking successes then we should stop buying from China and pay the money back. We are not the chosen even if some of us have this delusion.